Not Fair, Not Fun

America needs an anti-cheat daemon. People cheat to receive credit for work they didn't do. In games, players sometimes cheat to bypass annoyingly hard or boring tasks. This is fine for single player games. In multiplayer games, cheating would allow people to take advantage of each other, and developers do their best to squash it. For some reason, though, the developers of our government create laws which are analogous to cheat codes for multiplayer games. Lazy people leverage these laws to take rewards for others' hard work. Currently, there is no punishment for abusing the system. There should be. Anyone found exploiting the legal system needs to be permanently kick-banned. That is, if they misuse the laws, they are forbidden from ever again using the courts.

Cheap Caution

Most people don't care about security until it's too late. They entrust their data to large companies simply because those companies are large and well-known. Those companies generate massive profits without charging for service, but this doesn't raise any flags for most consumers. It shocks people to discover that free-service providers readily distribute their data. Trust should be honored, but in many cases, it isn't. It is unwise to dispense valuable information casually; think about what happens if it escapes. 

Hackers think about escaping data. They want to catch it. Groups like the Chaos Computer Club flourish because so many people find data theft amusing. Other groups sell this information or use it for political purposes. Some hackers are honest thieves, but the worst ones hide. Worse than any hacker, though, are governments and companies. Some employees of these organizations, if not the organizations themselves, will misuse this information. They have easy access to the information of thousands or millions of people, simply because those people trust them.

The internet survives on trust, and lack of trust will kill the internet. A complete lack of trust is the consequence of too much trust. People who trust too much will be betrayed at some point. They will then get scared and refuse to trust again. In contrast, trust in small amounts is easy to grant and replace; the risk is low. Internet users should trust only when necessary, and they should be conscious of their own (in)security. If they are wise, the internet can blossom into a grand community. If most users are foolish, the internet will collapse into a ghost town.

I was inspired to think this way about trust by The Cuckoo's Egg, which is a fascinating book. It reads like a novel, but it isn't a work of fiction. The author, Dr. Stoll, should have been a professional writer. Of course, if he had chosen that occupation, he'd never have had the experiences that made the book so interesting.

The One Program

The future cannot be contained in one piece of software; there will always be users for whom it does not work. There exists a lot of software which, while popular, is not very useful. Conversely, many useful programs are lost in obscurity. Software is born from want. If users don't find an existing program that fits their exact need, they look for another. Many users have the skills to create alternatives for themselves, and the ones who don't will buy from them. So even though large companies may hook a majority of consumers, they'll never catch us all.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/chrome-os/googles-new-desktop-strategy-invade-and-conquer-228300

Twitter Overload

I set out to follow #ldsconf. I'd never used Twitter, so I had to experiment to find a working solution.  The fist site I tried became unresponsive; it probably had server problems. Then I tried Twitter itself and learned that you can't follow hash tags automatically. So then I tried another aggregator. That one held up under load, but it didn't allow any speed controls on the feed. Tweets came pouring in and the screen flickered at a seizure-inducing rate.  Unable to read that fast, I tried one more service. It kept the refresh rate to two minutes and gradually let new tweets in. Despite changing feeds several times, I managed to follow quite a bit on Twitter; I don't think any of it was very important compared to the live talks.  I feel like I missed important messages because I split my attention too much.

Lament of a Lukewarm Genealogist

I believe that genealogy is important, but I haven't done much of my own. Most of my experience with genealogy comes from the FamilySearch Indexing program. I did try to do my own work by taking a class on Scandinavian family history. It was a good class, and I learned some useful techniques from it. Sadly, though, I haven't continued my work. Perhaps I just find the research too time consuming. Time, though, isn't the only cost. The best archives for Sweden cost money to access. BYU subscribes to them, but you can only access them from campus. I'd like to see free genealogy archives for more countries; I might be persuaded to spend more time on genealogy if I could freely browse census records during a spare moment at home.

Translation

Perfect translations don't exist. You see, translation is writing, and as writers, we rely on the human mind for feedback. We ask for consensus from our own mind, our editor's mind and the minds of all our readers. Sometimes we ignore the consensus. We take risks. The definition of 'good' changes whenever somebody forms an opinion. Machines can't translate any better than we can, but their translations are still useful. If nothing else, they can break translator's block by suggesting an idea you'd never have dreamed of in any other way.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/09/28/2025205/automatic-translation-without-dictionaries